Chaos God 5, page 12
part #5 of Chaos God Series
“No.” Elora shook her head slowly.
Before I had the chance to really process the presence of an older Valkyrie before us, I was hit with another surprise as a group of two dozen dark-skinned elves stepped out of the trees. Some of them had rich brown skin, several more were a similar bluish-gray as the male archer, and others were deep shades of ashy-gray. Their hair was every shade of black, brown, and gray, and a few of them had stark-white hair like Sontar.
They gathered around behind the Valkyrie and stared openly at me and my companions with various looks of curiosity and suspicion, but it was clear they weren’t going to make a single move without the winged elf’s order.
The short-haired Valkyrie stepped forward, and she stared at me with narrowed eyes for a second.
“I have shifting magic,” I explained, and I slowly allowed my bipedal wolf form to slip away.
One of the Valkyrie’s sharp eyebrows cocked just slightly as she watched my body transform. “Indeed.”
She didn’t sound very impressed by my declaration, but there was a curious spark in her black eyes. Then her sharp gaze turned to the fellow Valkyrie who stood almost protectively by my side, and her eyebrows rose with admiration. The scarred Valkyrie studied Elora’s features for a second, and then she gasped slightly as her lips fell open.
“I have heard of you, sister.” The older elf tilted her head to the side as she spoke, and her shoulders relaxed. “I recall, long before Ragnarok, the tales of the mixed-breed elf who proved her worth among Odin’s finest warriors.”
“My n-name is Elora,” my silver-haired beauty stuttered under the observant gaze of the older Valkyrie. “I cannot say I recognize you by appearance alone.”
“I am Nae,” she replied. “I was the leader of the Aftel Warriors, but that was a very long time ago.”
“I take it you’re in charge here?” I asked.
“I have protected the people of this village since the first attacks of Ragnarok,” Nae confirmed.
Nae gestured at the people behind her, and the dark-skinned elves stepped slowly forward.
“These are dark elves,” Elora murmured in a surprised whisper.
“They are,” Nae said with a little nod.
“And you are a light elf,” Elora pointed out as if she were trying to puzzle out the facts in front of her.
“I am,” Nae chuckled. “Does this surprise you, sister?”
“I– well…” Elora fumbled for a second, and her eyes blinked rapidly with disbelief. “Yes, it does. Perhaps my experiences are more limited than I thought, but I have never known light elves to be so… comfortable with dark elves.”
“Nae has proven herself,” the black-haired archer I’d spotted first said in a deep bass voice. “But we know not you, outsider.”
“Easy, Kine,” Nae said to the suspicious elf, and she held her hand up like she was telling a dog to wait for its treat. “Elora is my sister in honor and battle. She is a Valkyrie.”
“Fine, but what of the others?” the archer hissed so quickly I almost missed the words.
“We mean you no harm,” I insisted in a peaceful voice. “I have helped all of the people here with me today, and when I spotted your village, I thought I might be able to help you as well.”
“I know not if you can help us,” Nae said to me in a slightly colder tone than she’d used with Elora. “But I will not send you away as night approaches. You will come to the village and rest for the night so we may get to know each other a little better.”
“Thank you,” I said. “That is very kind of you.”
It wasn’t exactly a warm welcome, but I understood their suspicions. We were a bunch of pretty heavily armored and armed soldiers who’d walked up to their village unannounced, and this world was harsh and dangerous at best. I wasn’t above proving ourselves to Nae and her people, and the fact that she instantly seemed to trust Elora as a fellow Valkyrie gave us a good foot in the door.
“Follow me,” Nae said, and she turned with a bit of a flourish in her metallic wings.
The feathers seemed to move around her like protective little creatures, and I wondered if they gained more personality over the length of their relationship with their Valkyrie.
I half-turned around to look at my companions, and I spotted the concern in Freesia’s bright green eyes first.
“It’s alright,” I mouthed silently to my half-elf healer, and I gestured for us all to follow the older Valkyrie to her village.
Nae strode with purpose through the few inches of snow, and Kine gave me one more suspicious look before he snorted with contempt and quickly fell into step behind her. Then the others dispersed as well, but a female dark elf with beautiful skin the color of graphite and almond-shaped black eyes lingered for a moment.
Her white hair was pulled back into a sleek ponytail that flared out in all directions at the back of her head before it fell to the top of her slender neck. It looked like it was cut in a lot of sharp layers, and the longest locks would fall barely to her shoulder when it was down. Her black eyes studied me with open curiosity for a moment before she began to follow the group further north.
“This is very strange,” Elora murmured as we began to march behind the group of dark elves.
“How so?” I asked.
“I thought there was great distaste between dark and light elves,” Elora explained. “Nae must have proven herself many times over to have earned such blind trust from the elves here.”
“Or dark elves are not like what you have heard,” Ayen suggested with a little shrug of his shoulders.
“Ayen’s right,” I said. “Your personal experience with both light and dark elves hasn’t been the norm because of your family’s personal biases. And besides, we don’t know what these people have had to survive through since Ragnarok. If Nae has made it her purpose to keep them safe, I don’t see any reason why they’d hold onto prejudices that may have existed before.”
“Oh, I agree,” Elora said with a bemused smile. “I simply would not have expected this.”
We followed the group of dark elves and their Valkyrie leader another hundred yards through more evergreen trees and between the base of the mountains, until the stone village finally came into view ahead of us. The village was bigger and more spread out than it seemed from the air, and the buildings were larger, too. The smallest one was about fifty by sixty feet, and the peak of its slate roof stood around fifteen feet tall. They were built out of large blocks of gray stone with ashy-gray wooden doors and window frames. There was a firepit that was about seven feet in diameter near the middle of the town, and its fire burned low. Several more evergreen trees popped up randomly between the houses, but what we saw in the center of the village made my heart lurch anxiously.
A ten-foot-tall stone arch stood in the middle of the village square, which by itself wouldn’t have been a cause for alarm. But there was a stone pool filled with dark red liquid under the arch, and a large stone block on one side was covered in several decades’ worth of old bloodstains.
Every image of a guillotine or beheading that I’d ever seen in movies or on TV flashed across my eyes.
“Ugh,” Ayen muttered softly behind me.
“Easy.” I gestured slyly for my companions to keep themselves in check.
Insulting the dark elves would be a quick ticket to a bad time, and besides, I saw no evidence that they were killing each other or other people. I knew there was a similar pool of demon blood back at Castle Levi that would cause newcomers the same instant disgust that the village’s arch stirred in me. It was totally possible they had some kind of use for demon blood just like Hezzig did, and their setup was just different than ours.
More dark elves began to come out of the houses with curious eyes, and they all turned to look at Nae’s expression and body language before their tense shoulders eased. They wore thick leathers, and several of them also had fur-lined cloaks and shawls around their shoulders. They seemed fairly prepared for the cold weather of the area.
It was obvious to me that they all followed the Valkyrie with complete loyalty, and I knew she was going to be the one I had to win over to bring these people under my protection. At the very least, I wanted a peace alliance with them, but Nae did look pretty exhausted. Maybe she was ready to pass on the role of leadership to someone new.
There was only one way to find out.
“Welcome to the village,” Nae announced as she stopped a few feet away from the bloody arch. Her polite grin disappeared instantly when she looked at the anxious and worried expressions on my companions’ faces. “Worry not, this is not for any of you.”
“There’s no need to explain,” I said.
“We use blood magic,” Kine said in a voice that made me think he was trying to upset us.
“Yes,” the white-haired dark elf interrupted, and she stared at us with an almost pleading look on her beautiful face. “But it is the blood of demons and animals you see here. We are not savages.”
“We would not expect to understand your customs,” Elora replied in a gentle tone.
“We have a collection of demon blood back home, too,” I offered as a way to find a connection between our people. “My blacksmith uses it to quench the weapons he forges. It gives the blades all kinds of new qualities.”
“Ah, fascinating,” Nae murmured to me, and then she raised her voice to all the dark elf villagers who’d gathered cautiously around us. “As you can see, we have visitors to our village.”
“Who are they?” someone called from the small crowd.
“What do they want?” someone else shouted.
“Greevin shayte nyelv ka trin!” someone called in a slightly more hostile voice.
“Now, now,” Nae said in a comforting voice as she raised her hands into the air. “They have come a long way, and I have invited them to rest with us for the night.”
“Is she a Valkyrie?” a youthful voice asked.
I followed the sound of the voice and found something I hadn’t seen in the eight months I’d been on Asgard, and I couldn’t help but smile.
A small child with brown skin that was so dark it was almost black clung to her mother’s legs. The older dark elf stared at me with nervous red eyes as she pushed the child behind herself. The child looked like she was only about six or seven, but I had no idea what that meant in an elf’s altered lifespan. I knew Goren, who looked about fifteen, was actually closer to thirty, so she could be fifteen or twenty for all I knew.
“Yes,” Nae confirmed. “Elora is my sister Valkyrie, and these people come with their king.”
“My name is Levi,” I announced. “I promise you all, we have come in peace and in the hope that we can provide you help in any way you may need.”
Excited chatter rippled through the gathered elves, and the suspicious stares eased away. All except for Kine, who continued to narrow his black eyes at me with suspicion. I wondered if the blue-gray man was naturally suspicious of outsiders, or if he had other reasons for not liking my sudden appearance in his home. Perhaps he was another Ryfon-like asshole, or maybe he had his eyes set on Nae’s leadership role. If he did, I was certainly going to appear as stiff and unwanted competition. I decided I would keep a close eye on the dark-blue archer until I knew more about his intentions.
“Föskjemper?” the mother who shielded her young daughter called, and there was a heavy current of hope in her voice.
Another wave of excited chatter worked its way through the group, and I glanced at Elora to see if she knew what the woman had said. Elora’s silvery eyebrows knitted together, and she gave me the tiniest shake of her head.
I wondered if the dark elves had a language all their own, or if the new accent I heard in all of their voices was from a totally different dialect that this village had developed over their years of isolation from the rest of the world.
“You have my word that these visitors will do us no harm this night,” Nae announced. “Sleep in peace, and perhaps we may find a solution to what has plagued us.”
Many of the archers who’d hidden in the trees during our arrival wandered off and disappeared into the stone houses throughout the village, and the rest of the dark elves wandered away much more slowly.
Soon, my companions and I stood nearly alone with Nae, Kine, and the white-haired female whose name I hadn’t yet gotten.
A small scattering of other villagers lingered in the town square as they seemed to find things to keep them in the area. One older-looking elf picked up a large woven basket and began taking clothing down from a line. Another middle-aged male sat by the firepit and stoked the low embers back to life with a few fresh logs.
Nae waited patiently like a manager as her employees sorted themselves back to work after a midday meeting, and once everyone dispersed, she turned to us.
“If you will follow me, please,” Nae said, and she didn’t wait for an answer before she began walking briskly to a large building nearby.
“Right.” I smirked at her no-nonsense attitude as I followed the scarred Valkyrie.
Kine watched us with narrowed eyes, but he didn’t follow. The white-haired female did follow us, though, and I found that her presence intrigued me.
The interior of the larger building was lit by some kind of odd bluish orbs the size of cantaloupes, and they were dotted along the walls every few feet. They cast their strange blue light all throughout the large room, and it was well illuminated. A large circular table that gave off huge King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table vibes took up all the space in the middle of the otherwise empty room. Two dozen simple wooden stools sat evenly spaced around the table, and Nae walked around to sit on the far side.
Her metallic wings tucked in close behind her back, and the white-haired female settled onto the stool to her left.
“Please, seat yourselves so we may speak more,” the old Valkyrie invited.
“Thank you for your hospitality,” I said as I took a seat across from her.
Elora sat down on my right, and Freesia made her position in our group clear by sitting pointedly at my left.
Nae’s dark eyebrow arched again at Freesia’s possessive display, and she quickly glanced between my two ladies as if she were trying to figure out what our dynamic was.
The rest of our company sat down on either side of us until there were only empty seats beside Nae and the white-haired elf.
“I know you’ve only invited us to stay for the evening,” I began. “But I was sincere when I said we wanted to help you in any way we can.”
“King Levi has helped all of our peoples,” one of my dwarven warriors declared.
Both the ladies across from me seemed intrigued and a bit uncertain by the statement.
“It is true,” Elora insisted. “During the time that I have had the pleasure of knowing Levi, he has saved the lives of every person he has come in contact with.”
I worked to keep my face blank as the fact of the lives I’d taken nagged at me. But Ryfon and Gaelyra had both done plenty to deserve their fates as far as I was concerned. Ryfon especially. I’d given him the chance to leave with his life intact, but he’d chosen his fate.
“King Levi freed Elora, Sontar, Vulmar, and myself.” Ayen indicated each of the members of the old encampment as he spoke. “From the clutches of a monstrous Demon Lord.”
“And then he saved my people from a nest of mindless demon drones,” the dwarven warrior added.
“He saved the people of my village, too,” Freesia concluded.
“It sounds as though many people owe you their lives,” the gorgeous white-haired elf murmured, and her black eyes were bright with interest.
“I’m glad I’ve been able to do so much good,” I said simply.
“You may be able to help us,” Nae said after a tense and silent moment.
“I will do whatever I can,” I assured the scarred Valkyrie.
“These people need leadership and protection from the trouble that comes from the north,” Nae explained.
“But Nae, you give us that,” the white-haired elf insisted. “For as long as I can remember, you have kept us safe.”
“I am tired. And I am old, Lyrie,” Nae sighed with all the exhaustion in her soul. “And I was about to retire from this life of war and death when the world began to collapse.”
Lyrie’s white eyebrows knitted together like she hadn’t considered Nae’s age as important, and I wondered how young and inexperienced the dark elf was.
“Can we go back a step?” I asked. “What troubles come from the north?”
“I am sure you have noticed the snow and cold here in our valley.” Nae gestured vaguely around.
“It has been ages since I have seen snow,” Freesia mused almost wistfully.
“And we have not known life without it in months,” Lyrie grumbled.
“Is that… odd… for this region?” I asked.
“Long before Ragnarok, this area would have cold seasons,” Nae explained. “But since the destruction of the world began, we have known warmer weather than this. Now, the cold has become an ever-present shadow in our valley, and it threatens the lives of our people. We were lucky during the early years. This valley was mostly ignored by the chaos of the demon hordes.”
“That sounds lucky,” Ayen chuckled with little humor in his voice.
“Do you know why?” I wondered.
“I believe,” Nae murmured. “The location of this village, while it was a hardship for these people before the world ended, was a benefit during the dark times. Our proximity to The Crystal Spire as well as the natural landscape of the mountains created a combination of defenses. There were far greater targets for the creatures of Ragnarok and the demons to focus their malice upon. This village was of little value to them when Odin Allfather was so nearby.”
“That makes sense.” I nodded. “So what’s going on now, then?”
“We know not what has changed,” Nae said, and Lyrie frowned deeply beside her. “We only know the snow and cold have come to stay. They have ruined our crops and threatened our ability to feed ourselves.”
“But Nae… what about–” Lyrie began to ask, but the Valkyrie cut her off with a lightning-quick glance.
